To celebrate the culmination of their six-month residency in the Museum’s Artist Studios, artists Chenlu Hou, Terumi Saito, and MAD Artist Fellow Shradha Kochhar will each speak about their respective practices. Following the talks, visitors will have the opportunity to meet the artists in their studios and see their work created at MAD.

This event is free with registration.

SCHEDULE

6:30–7:15 pm: artist talks in the Theater
7:15–8 pm: open studios on Floor 6

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Shradha Kochhar is an artist and educator best known for her innovative homespun and handknitted khadi sculptures using Kala cotton, an inherently organic cotton strain indigenous to India. Her work delves into material memory, regeneration, and intergenerational dialogue, researching indigenous cotton varieties in India and the US to explore cotton legacies across time and space. Kochhar’s large-scale sculptures serve as tangible archives of South Asian women's stories, revealing the often-overlooked aspects of invisible labor and collective grief.

Chenlu Hou’s work features imaginative depictions of women, animals, and plants rendered onto hand-built ceramic objects. It takes storytelling as a meeting point of concurrent and past. Hou's experiences living in the United States since 2017 and the culture she inherited while residing in China fuse to form these narrative ceramic objects. Building with clay becomes a metaphoric process that speaks to her adaptation to a new environment, from the frightening to the mundane: intimidation, distortion, excitement, confusion, and eventually, celebration.

Interweaving fiber and clay, Terumi Saito’s work reimagines backstrap weaving, one of the earliest weaving techniques with a rich history in Asia and Central and South America. In Japan, backstrap weaving dates to the Yayoi period (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE).  Using natural dyes and fibers and hand-built ceramics, Saito combines traditional and ancient backstrap weaving techniques in a meticulous, labor-intensive creative process. In this way, she aims to preserve endangered traditional techniques and shed new light on them through a contemporary lens.